I haven’t lost my mind. I was just testing out the augmented reality features on the Nintendo 3DS. I just won the system at a school fundraiser and think the augmented reality, rather than the 3D, could be the real draw of the system.

The 3DS is equipped with three cameras and (essentially) three screens. One camera faces you. The other two are in the back. There are two visible screens and an LCD barrier behind the top panel that is used to create the 3D illusion during gameplay.

AR cards can come alive in your environment with the 3DS cameras

This is not essential to the augmented reality gaming aspect. The system has a number of AR games that work without cards and some games have features built into the cartridge. I just think that the scanning AR aspect has the most potential.

Games like Kid Icarus: Uprising and Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir come with augmented reality add-ons that can impact the way the game plays. In the case of Kid Icarus: Uprising, you’re given a stack of six random cards that can be read by the 3DS with the third camera. The AR cards can be lined up to battle each other in your environment. They’re a minigame that can be expanded on by using or trading cards with your friends.

In the case of Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir, you start to see the true potential of an augmented reality gaming experience. This is the newest Fatal Frame game about the powers of the camera obscura to battle ghosts through photography. For the 3DS, you play with a booklet–the cursed memoir itself–that has AR codes hidden throughout its pages.

The cursed memoir is the key to an immersive AR gaming experience

As the game progresses, the line between the haunted house and your own living space blurs. Ghosts appear in your room and try to destroy you as the break out of the book. You have to scan your physical space with the console to find them and photograph them before they kill you.

I can understand skepticism about the augmented reality gaming on the 3DS. How portable is the gaming console if you need to be able to stand up and move around to play? What about the amount of direct light you need to get the AR codes to activate properly? Does staring at a screen really give you an immersive playing experience?

Those are legitimate questions. Not every developer is going to go for the AR gaming, so there will be plenty of traditional portable games to work with. The amount of light needed is honestly a small desk lamp in an otherwise dark room, so it’s really not that distracting.

As for immersion, that’s up to you. If you don’t like Japanese-style ghost stories or don’t care for survival horror gaming, you’re not going to be sucked into Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir at all. You’ll actively look for excuses–the room is too bright, I feel foolish, I know I’m not actually in danger so it’s not scary–to write off the AR gameplay. But if they could create the same experience with a first person shooter or an action rpg, you might see it differently.

I don’t know whether or not developers will go further into the AR gaming elements. Even adding in optional features could be a fun way to build up gameplay. Imagine being able to walk through the ever changing village of Animal Crossing or play a minigame in a Zelda release where you control your horse through an obstacle course by moving the 3DS around. The augmented reality elements do not have to be the entirety of the game. It would just be interesting to see what other ways developers can come up with to use a pretty inventive system for interactivity.

Thoughts? Any games you wish could overtake your playing space? Ideas for how AR gaming could evolve to the mainstream? Love to hear your ideas. Sound off below.

You control the game through the touch screen. Collect infection and DNA bubbles to boost your points and pop blue research bubbles to slow down the cure. You interact with menus, news, and data by clicking. The controls are easy to pick up and make sense.

Yesterday, the game updated to fix a few bugs. Too bad Ndemic Creations didn’t address some of the game-killing flaws.

Mark my word, Plague Inc. will crash on you. It might crash in the beginning. It’s more likely to crash when you’re about to win. You can save at any time and quit back to the menu, but a game isn’t fun when you have to keep taking yourself out of the action to preemptively strike against bad coding.

You can’t click through the active buttons on top, but you can see through them

There are other issues with the game. The random symptoms that evolve on their own are typically the symptoms that actually hurt your fight against the cure. If you’re awarded tumors, you’ll get a news pop up a minute later saying scientists have an advantage against tumors. It no longer matters that you are infecting people with paralysis, insanity, and hemophilia. Suddenly, the cure is only days away because tumors are easier to treat than paper cuts.

There are other simulation games that do what Plague Inc. tries to do available for free online. I recommend Pandemic II as a free alternative. It’s not a real time game, but it provides the same strategic experience with fewer problems.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.

Here’s a sample. In this video, she analyzes the use of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games through the lens of realistic responses to violence and trauma. Her analysis is even-handed and backed up by evidence every step of the way. She defines her focus and presents her arguments in a clear and logical way.

Sarkeesian decided to launch a Kickstarter project to examine five tropes used again and again in video games. She does not use loaded language or judge the repetition as overtly negative or positive because she hasn’t completed her research. True, she says that the tropes are “harmful.” That’s when she also mentions that there are games that hit on these tropes in more positive ways.

The goal was to raise $6000 to cover the costs associated with playing hundreds of video games for five videos. Presumably, these include acquiring the games, capturing images and playback, research expenses, and the actual labor that goes into putting a video series together. It’s a small amount for a video game project. Plus, that’s a genre that has really taken off on Kickstarter recently.

The project has been so successful that Sarkeesian is going to produce 12 videos: another six videos on tropes and one video on common defenses of sexism in gaming. She’s even writing a classroom curriculum to accompany the videos. What a great and positive use of resources for education, right?

Not so fast. Anita Sarkeesian has gone from pop culture critic to an example of how women are portrayed in media. Apparently, some male gamers have decided that Sarkeesian is a bad person for even suggesting that there might be female stereotypes in games.

That’s the kind way of saying what they’re doing. The reality is disturbing. A group of 4Chan users–though I doubt they’re the only ones doing it–are trying to get her Kickstarter project taken down for various TOS violations. They’re flagging her YouTube videos as hate speech because, to them, feminist means someone who hates men. They edited her Wikipedia page so much that it got locked. They flooded her comment sections with hate speech, telling her to lie back and take it, go back to the kitchen to get them a sandwich, or shave off her hair and stop wearing makeup if being a feminist matters to her.

It doesn’t matter that Sarkeesian hasn’t said any of the things they accuse her of saying. They’re trying to redefine the argument as “video games aren’t designed for women” or “men are portrayed poorly, too, so this project is invalid.” They’re actively campaigning against her success for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with her project. It’s clear that most of the participants in this effort did not watch her Kickstarter video or read her project proposal. They’re setting up straw men while demonstrating the continued need for this kind of research at all.

Maybe the outrage proves how much we need an analysis of harmful tropes in video games

Cartman says most of these things on South Park and he’s quoted verbatim in many of the comments. You can find references pulled from Peter Griffin, Stan Smith, and a host of other TV and movie characters. In the context of their shows, this behavior is funny because the writers realize how absurd the comments are. In the real world, it’s disturbing because these people actually believe what they’re saying.

Anita Sarkeesian’s project is funded so long as the Kickstarter stays up. As of this posting, she raised over $92,000 for the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games project. I look forward to seeing her finished videos and can only hope that these objectors actually take the time to listen to her actual arguments. I’m not holding my breath.

What do you think? Any games you think Sarkeesian should look into for the project? I think Haunting Ground provides an interesting angle for Damsel in Distress. Fiona is the active investigator in the game, but she is incapable of defending herself against any attack unless her big strong dog is by her side. One game mechanic is actually running away and hiding to decrease the risk posed by a hulking male menace.

And what about this whole “they’re only trolling” defense I’ve seen pop up? Does that mitigate the outrageous nature of the attacks at all? Sound off below. Love to hear from you.

Psych Out is a curious puzzle platform game. You play as a mental patient tied up in a straight jacket. Your goal is to break out of the lockdown facility. Unfortunately, you aren’t very reliable. Every single time you open a door, you find a new way to complicate the rules.

He's not even playing the same game as you.

The controls are WASD or the arrows and nothing more. Up/W is jump, left/A and right/D are left and right, and Down/S is action. That’s all you need to play. That and the ability to keep re-configuring your brain to play with new rules every stage.

A lot of puzzle platformers try to make you feel hopeless and confused. Psychout does it in a fun way. Is it frustrating at times? Yes, but there’s always an easy solution. You’ll know as soon as you enter a room what the options are. It’s just a matter of figuring out which option is the right one.

There are some tricky timing issues with some of the jumps and a few places where Kongregate was perhaps a bit too specific in location to be a super casual platformer. If you’ve played this kind of game before, you’ll figure it out. If not, the learning curve might be a bit steeper than expected.

So are you going to give Psychout a try? Sound off below and let me know what you think.

Thank goodness other people don’t give up as easily as me. Users at Reddit are creating a real life version of the game Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne. The racist, sexist, anti-hippie video game was the center of a recent episode of Community.

In “Digital Estate Planning”, Pierce Hawkthorne is told that his millionaire father has developed a high tech (8-bit but with user recognition capabilities) video game. The entire study group is invited to play. They soon discover that it is a trick to punish Pierce for his request to borrow money to develop a video game over 30 years ago. The only way Pierce earns his inheritance is to be the first player to defeat the game.

Play as the study group, or go wild with one-offs like Seacrest Hulk

Unfortunately, you can’t do a lot of things yet. There is no chance to kill someone with DIY alchemy. You can’t murder the blacksmith and burn down the survivors. And you certainly can’t take over the entire game by building an elaborate golden city with in-game robot slave children. Some day.

I like it when fans put their heads together and develop something fun for other fans to do. They’re on shaky legal ground in using another group’s IPR, but they’re not selling the game. It’s freeware by fans, for fans. There’s a chance they could get away with parody claim. It won’t necessarily avoid trouble if NBC decides to get litigious, but it could be enough to discourage any action against the Reddit group developing Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne.

Have you downloaded the latest version of the game yet? What do you think? It controls well. I just wish there was more to it. You can’t really complain when they’re releasing the game as it’s developed and fixing bugs within hours of user reports. Sound off below with your thoughts.

The games in Humble Indie Bundle V are great. There’s no other way to put it.

Pscyhonauts is one of the all time great platforming/adventure games. You play as a young Psycadet, taking over the minds of various characters to fight against an evil plot to extract the brains of young psychics. It’s a ton of fun and more than worth getting the whole package for.

Limbo is another cool game. This highly stylized puzzle platformer has you guide a young character through a series of deadly obstacles. Every time you die, you go back to the last checkpoint and try to get just a little further. It’s a beautiful gaming experience.

Speaking of death, Humble Indie Bundle V also includes one of the great computer only horror games. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is disturbing. You play as a young Londoner in the 1800s who erased his own memory in order to protect himself as he goes after the Baron. This game will keep you up at night.

I haven’t had any experience with the other two games, Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP or Bastion, but both score high at Metacritic (linked to titles).

To unlock all five games, you have to more than the average purchase price. As of this writing, that means spending $7.87 to get $63 in DRM-free games for your PC, Mac, or Linux system. Tack on an extra dollar if you want to unlock them all in Steam. That’s a steal. Combined with the donations to charity, you can feel good about buying games. Even if you only wind up liking one of the titles (happened to me III (I think), where I only really got into Atom Zombie Smasher, the pay more bonus game), you’re still paying less than the cost of the cheapest game in the bundle.

Doesn’t it feel good to be a gamer sometimes?

What do you think? Are you going to pick up Humble Indie Bundle V? Play any of these games already? Sound off below.

The strange part of embracing this mechanic is realizing how repetitive gaming commands are. If you use a controller, there are only a finite number of buttons and combinations. All that changes is what you’re controlling on the screen.

Fruit Ninja and Zombie Slash are the same game and I own both. Send help.

Enter the Wii U. The Wii pushed itself as a casual gaming console for better or worse. The motion controller made it so anyone could play with minimal button pushing. The Wii U goes further, adding a touch control tablet into the middle of a console gaming experience.

E3 is showing off the benefits and limits of the approach right now. Nintendo has developed mini games where you can swipe your finger across the screen to throw ninja stars or swing a Wiimote over the screen to hit a golf ball. As intuitive as the approach is for a casual gamer, can the Wii U actually hold the interest of a more experienced gamer? When the novelty wears off, it will come down to the quality of the content.

If the developers get on board, this invasion of the casual touchscreen mechanics could be a great addition to the world of console gaming. If it’s just treated like the freeware version of a Zynga game, however, it will quickly gather dust on shelves all around the world.

What do you think? I love the idea of gaming becoming ubiquitous in society so long as the iPad “play for two minutes and put it down” gamer is not the only targeted consumer. There’s a wide enough market to target all sorts of gamers. How about you? Sound off below.

Not this time around. The Wii U, with its HD graphics and honest to goodness dual control sticks, is attracting real games for launch. One of these is a new zombie game from Ubisoft called ZombiU.

Yes, the trailer isn’t actual gameplay footage. I don’t care at this point. It’s beautiful. The HD graphics pop and the conceit–a moving photograph of the zombie apocalypse as it starts in London–is good. It’s certainly elevated by the dirge-like punk interpretation of “God Save the Queen.”

The trailer is NSFW due to massive blood and brain matter loss.

The tagline at the end of the video makes me think we might get a new zombie gaming experience. “How Long Will You Survive?” Could this be some kind of open-ended exploration/survival game rather than a narrative game with hope of resolution? That’s exciting.

What do you think? Is Nintendo going to win over any “hardcore” gamers with this kind of launch title? Sound off below.

My love of those games have continued for years. I only recently put down The Sims 3 (switched my primary computer months after the screen cracked) where my primary goal was designing new and bizarre houses and bringing my Sims to the brink of death again and again. I’d force married couples to break up and start dating their comically mismatched neighbors. I’m a terrible Sim abuser and I will not apologize for it.

Looks like EA games has decided to mash the two together. Enjoy the civic planning of SimCity by way of the elaborate real time multi-city interaction of The Sims 3. The game trailer from E3 looks beautiful.

While I appreciate the giant dinosaur attack, I say it needs more hurricanes. Every Sim game is better with hurricanes.

SimCity is a PC-exclusive coming out in February 2013. via Kotaku.

So, will you be playing the new SimCity? Have a favorite Sim-brand game? I still putter around on Sim Theme Park after my brother convinced the family not to buy me RollerCoaster Tycoon for Christmas a dozen years ago. What about you? Sound off below.

First up is Orange Roulette. This is a dark and disturbing static shooter about an anthropomorphic orange forced to play a series of Russian Roulette games to earn his freedom from jail. The style of the game is undeniable. The content is questionable but surprisingly engaging.

What would you do to break out of prison in Orange Roulette?

The downside to the game is the randomly generated stages. The constantly shifting story–each time you lose, you basically get a new identical orange with a variant storyline–is intriguing. The inability to know for sure what the pace of the match is becomes frustrating. It’s not like you can memorize the sequence of events and play to the end. It changes every time.

It’s a tense and quick diversion that’s worth a look if you can handle the subject matter.

The second game is Last Guardian. This is a bit more traditional only in its framing as a tower defense game. You are an archer defending the castle from wave after wave of mythical beasts.

Think before you loose your arrows in Last Guardian

Then you start to upgrade your arsenal. Will you focus on better arrows for stronger attacks? Faster reloads so you can take more shots? Or will you spend your experience on magical spells that call upon mythological creatures to defend the gate while you aim for trickier shots?

There is no right or wrong strategy because no method is easier than any other. That’s the novelty of the game. You can’t go wrong unless you don’t experiment with how to shoot the arrow. Everything else is at the mercy of a very tight and balanced game design.

What do you think? Will you be giving either game a shot? Orange Roulette is a bigger draw for me, but I do like dark content. Share your opinions below.